Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lolpez Obrador, of the National Regeneration Movement, or "morena" made his final campaign stop for Baja California at the state auditorium in Mexicali on Monday, June 18, 2018, just weeks before the general elections on July 1st. His leftist leaning party is making a strong showing so far in polling before the election.

Sounding the main theme of his presidential campaign — a vow to eliminate corruption in Mexico — front-runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a final push for votes in Baja California on Monday.

Less than two weeks before Mexico’s July 1 election, the 64-year-old leftist candidate vowed before some 4,000 supporters in Mexicali that his presidency would bring the country “a profound transformation that has not been seen in 100 years.”

Front-running Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a final push for votes in Baja California on Monday.

Front-running Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador made a final push for votes in Baja California on Monday.

López Obrador is a veteran politician making his third presidential bid, and this time he holds the undisputed lead, maintaining a double-digit advantage in national polls over his closest opponents — Ricardo Anaya of Mexico’s National Party (PAN) and José Antonio Meade of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). A fourth candidate, political independent Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, has been lagging a distant fourth.

Here at the California border, in a state that has been a bastion of the PAN, López Obrador’s message has been winning support, according to a recent survey by a Baja California polling group, Plural.mx, whose results earlier this month put López Obrador in the lead statewide.

As he addressed a near-capacity crowd at the state auditorium, López Obrador said his presidency would signal a “fourth transformation” for Mexico. “We are fortunate in that we will achieve this transformation without bloodshed,” he said. “This will be a peaceful, moderate revolution, but a profound one.”

He vowed a range of measures that include slashing the salaries and perks of high-ranking government officials, eliminating pensions for former presidents, raising benefits for retirees and students, offering subsidies to small farmers and lowering the costs of gasoline and electricity.

If elected, he said he would move out of the Mexican presidential residence, Los Pinos, and cut his own salary in half.

López Obrador’s coalition, Together We Will Make History, includes his own party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) as well as the smaller leftist Workers Party, and the Social Encounter Party, a group linked to evangelical Christians.

López Obrador is an economic nationalist, who won high approval ratings as mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005.

He has been a fierce critic of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s energy reforms that have opened the sector to foreign private investment. But he has also said that he supports continuing the North American Free Trade Agreement.

For the country’s northern border, López Obrador’s economic plans include the creation of a special economic zone, stimulating growth with measures such as doubling the minimum wage, lowering the sales and income taxes, and pegging the price of gasoline and other fuels to those in nearby U.S. communities.

On the campaign trail, he has spoken frequently about the “mafia of power” that he says has robbed ordinary Mexicans of what is rightfully theirs. “The problem is not that there is a lack of resources, it’s that they’ve stolen the resources,” he told his cheering supporters on Monday.

Some statements have struck fear in the country’s business sector, and raised questions as to just how far he will take the reforms if he is elected. But López Obrador has successfully tapped into feelings of anger among Mexicans who have seen little progress in their daily lives, and found their communities besieged by unprecedented violence, much of it in areas of high drug consumption.

Like many others at the Mexicali rally, Angel Norzagaray, a 56-year-old playwright and theater director, was preparing to cast his third presidential vote for López Obrador.

“The fight against corruption is essential,” said Norzagaray, a former state cultural official and until recently vice-rector at the Mexicali campus of the Autonomous University of Baja California. “This discourages people from making an effort, because they think a corrupt official will just take it away from them.”

Some fear that if elected, López Obrador will not be as stringent in fighting corruption among his supporters. Political analyst Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez raised the question in a column on Monday in the Mexico City newspaper, Reforma. López Obrador’s fight against corruption, he wrote, “would also have to be a fight against many of his allies.”

But in Mexicali on Monday morning, supporters eager for change offered only enthusiastic support. The candidate’s arrival lit up members of the crowd, many of them retirees who shouted pre-si-den-te in unison.

Waving a large flag near the front of the was Lily Arguello, 61, a former Spanish-language teacher who has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship and lives in San Diego’s Golden Hill neighborhood.

“I’ve voted for the PAN and the PRI, but they don’t fulfill their promises,” Arguello said.

She was hardly the only member of the crowd with U.S. ties. Juan Manuel Sánchez, 62, a retired Mexicali school teacher, said he spent more than two decades working as a cook at a restaurant in Holtville in Imperial County.